Hatou Manabu has a very odd friend at school named Marii Yukari. Yukari has purple eyes and a bizarre way of looking at the world: she sees all living things as robots. This has not always worked out well for Yukari, even costing her a best friend when she was younger. However, Yukari insists that the things she says she sees is true, and her vision seems to give her insight into the abilities of others.

Manabu thinks she’s just weird, but she soon realizes that Yukari has unexpected talents. Her eyes allow her to view the world in a different way, and even the police come to hear her insights. Eventually, her eyes also get Manabu wrapped up in dangerous plots, and force Manabu to not only step up and take a much more proactive role in her own life, but also to question what being a human or a robot actually means.

Qualia is probably notorious for being one of the most mind-screwy series ever to come out of Japan. And I have to say from translating it that it quite lives up to its reputation. It starts off as a normal (?) school life comedy, but then quickly turns dark, into sci-fi, thriller, suspense, mecha, philosophical, with a splash of yuri on top. For those who’ve checked out the manga before, I highly recommend a read of the novel.

A teaser, consisting of the prologue, color illust, and first chapter have already been posted. The rest of the volume is actually already finished but we are giving it a good cleansing with some talented editors. Due to the suspenseful nature of the story, the rest of the volume will be posted entirely *IN ONE UPDATE*, currently scheduled for around a month from now. However, in an effort to promote awareness for this project and our light novel hijinks in general, we are offering to speed that up if people like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (go to the translation site for details). Think of it as a way of giving back to the community by helping us spread the word of light novels to the world!

As for the puzzle, take each food pictured in each row and put the letters across the squares. Pick out the letter corresponding to each food square. You will get Quailegg/mUffin/mArshmallow/guacamoLe/croIssant/plantAin, which spells out QUALIA. For people who thought the last one was a banana, you could’ve gotten to plantain by realizing you needed an 8 letter word for something similar to a banana.

PS: For those who noticed, yes we are moving off wordpress to a new site. Any feedback on that new site design too would also be welcome.

The new site is in pretty much alpha stages at this point, so we’ll be adding features later. So definitely if you have features you want to see it’d be a nice time to tell us so we can inform the dev team.

Please incorporate Disqus chat into it. The custom chats on sites like Tsuki Usagi Cafe, Gravity tales , Wuxia world etc are annoying to sign into, nor can we track if replies are made (in a convenient manner). Even Skytheworld-chan has moved to Disqus.

Please do make a stable RSS/Atom feature, if possible. Such that one may include the feed in one’s own feed-host, or at least the classical Thunderbird. Even WordPress has one.
An SSL/TSL connection would be nice, too.. But all of this is merely my humble opinion.